Longdon as
conscious of an absence of prejudice would have been justified for a
spectator by the particular feeling that Mr. Cashmore's speech caused
her to disclose. What did this feeling wonderfully appear unless
strangely irrelevant? "I've no patience when I hear you talk as if you
weren't horribly rich."

He looked at her an instant as if guessing she might have derived that
impression from Harold. "What has that to do with it? Does a rich man
enjoy any more than a poor his wife's making a fool of him?"

Her eyes opened wider: it was one of her very few ways of betraying
amusement. There was little indeed to be amused at here except his
choice of the particular invidious name. "You know I don't believe a
word you say."

Mr. Cashmore drank his tea, then rose to carry the cup somewhere and put
it down, declining with a motion any assistance. When he was on the sofa
again he resumed their intimate talk. "I like tremendously to be with
you, but you mustn't think I've come here to let you say to me such
dreadful things as that." He was an odd compound, Mr. Cashmore, and the
air of personal good health, the untarnished bloom which sometimes lent
a monstrous serenity to his mention of the barely mentionable, was on
occasion balanced or matched by his playful application of extravagant
terms to matters of much less moment. "You know what I come to you
for, Mrs. Brook: I won't come any more if you're going to be horrid and
impossible."

"You come to me, I suppose, because--for my deep misfortune, I assure
you--I've a kind of vision of things, of the wretched miseries in which
you all knot yourselves up, which you yourselves are as little blessed
with as if, tumbling about together in your heap, you were a litter of
blind kittens."

"Awfully good that--you do lift the burden of my trouble!" He had
laughed out in the manner of the man who made notes for platform use of
things that might serve; but the next moment he was grave again, as if
his observation had reminded him of Harold's praise of his wit. It was
in this spirit that he abruptly brought out: "Where, by the way, is your
daughter?"

"I haven't the least idea. I do all I can to enter into her life, but
you can't get into a railway train while it's on the rush."

Mr. Cashmore swung back to hilarity. "You give me lots of things. Do you
mean she's so 'fast'?" He could keep the ball going.

Mrs. Brookenham obliged him with what she meant. "No; she's a tremendous